DJs and Indians

“Look at that f---er!” Gabe spits out the words like bullets, and turns to me with squinted eyes. “What’s even going through his mind?”

We’re all sitting in the dusty corner of a downtown sandwich shop. We originally went down to check out a spray-paint gallery a local artist had set up, but the gallery was more a cupboard than anything else. It’s now the DJ who holds our attention. Specifically, the painfully white DJ wearing an enormous Plains Indian war bonnet.

It may very well have been the most offensive thing any of us have seen since coming to Asheville.

Of course, I’m sure that the DJ didn’t realize the offensiveness of his attire. He was staring fixedly at his Macbook, stirring up an abomination of club music and ambient noise. Every now and then he’d bump up the levels on his mixing console with a bone-colored hand and push the sound further into the treble. He was bobbing up and down like a culturally inconsiderate worm. The headdress, I swear, glistened in the neon lights.

Appropriation of a native culture by the people that tried to exterminate that culture is nothing new. Blackface and redface acts have been around for virtually as long as we’ve known about the races we were mocking. In the 60s, the hippies wore American Indian clothes in an attempt to capture the Indians’ “free spirit,” a hideously incorrect though well-intentioned belief.

But the war bonnet seemed different. Maybe it was the oblivious smirk the DJ wore. Maybe it was the fact that the bonnet was perched on top of his head so innocuously. But Gabe and I were in agreement: there was something seriously annoying about this person wearing another culture’s heritage so blatantly. 

I'm realizing now, though, that this attitude has permeated our culture. We as children still grow up playing Cowboys & Indians. The Atlanta Braves and the Cleveland Indians still compete every year. American Spirit, despite being founded in the post-redface 80s, prominently features an war bonnet-wearing warrior smoking on the cover of the pack. Surrounded by so much blatant appropriation, could I even fault the DJ that much?

Thinking back on it, I might have figured out what we found so offensive about the DJ's outfit: the banality of it. With both the redface troupes and the hippies, the intent in donning Indian clothing was to become something other than themselves. The redface performer would become a parody of an Indian. The hippy would become the same thing, without realizing it. Despite this, though, they still fundamentally realized that they were transforming themselves into something other than themselves. The DJ only realized he was transforming himself into a DJ with a headdress. Perhaps that is what our culture has become: an assimilation of elements from other cultures, destroying them by making them our own. The idea of the American mixing pot suddenly doesn't sound so good after all.